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26 May 2017

Before the bombing

On Sunday, the end of Christian Aid week, there was a bake
sale at the church and Yoko made rice crispy treats with dark chocolate so that
Mei could eat them and they could be sold with cupcakes during the time after
the service. The church is on the hill above Victoria Road and the bells ring
at 9:30, when I am walking Mei up to the choir practice before the service, and
then back down in the sun as summer, British summer, is taunting us. We sing
our way through the service and then communion and the processional and I get
caught up talking to the old academics at the church hall afterwards, the men
that I look at and think have lived the dream, teaching and working well into
their seventies and only stopping because they can’t physically do it anymore.

I walked up to the university, Mei and Mia at a friends
house, to pick up a book I had ordered then sit and read it a bit before
walking back into town to buy a some pale ale in a can and walk up the high
street, everything closed because it was after five on a Sunday, but the
afternoon seeming to go and on as it does at the end of May.

I came past the takeaways at the end of the High Street, and
the barber that I used to go to until Brexit and I started getting my hair cut at the Turkish barber shop. I turned the
corner, and then was struck suddenly, like in the sort of pathetic manic way I
am at times, by the beauty of the road, leafy as they would say here, and sun
streaming through the trees that had been there forever. Yoko and I once found
a picture of the church and the pub next to it from a newspaper in the early-1900s.
It looked the same, the same huge trees coming up around it. Do you see this, I
wanted to say to the guy passing in the tracksuit, headed somewhere – do you
see where we are. This is where Virginia Woolf was. This is where it all
happens.

I slowed down, thinking about when I first came to this
country in 2002, when I had just cut my hair. I spent 18 hours in London,
wandering around and making my way to Hyde Park. It was what I thought it would
be – massive and grand and British, the way you want Britain to be. I don’t
remember much of anything really. I remember sitting on a bench and thinking,
naively and foolishly, Well, what comes next then. What comes next.